Words That Sound Like You
Most copywriting on the internet right now sounds the same.
Most copywriting on the internet right now sounds the same.
You can feel it before you can name it. The same opening hooks. The same rhythms. The same call-to-action patterns. The same “Here’s what I learned” structures. The same “Three things that changed everything” frameworks. Different industries, different audiences, different prices. Same voice.
This isn’t because writers are lazy. It’s because formulaic copy is easier to produce, easier to teach, and easier to feel safe behind. If you follow the formula, you don’t have to know your audience. You don’t have to know yourself. You can just plug variables into the template and watch words appear.
The problem is that readers can feel it too. They scroll past faster. They don’t subscribe. They don’t buy. They don’t remember which copywriter wrote which sales page, because all the sales pages sound like the same person.
When I say I write copy that sounds like you, this is what I mean: words that are unmistakably the voice of the person behind the business. Not a template. Not a brand voice generated from a quiz.
Not the convergent-evolution sound of every coach, consultant, and course creator on Instagram.
You.
Here’s what most people don’t realize about voice in copywriting: it doesn’t come from a personality test or a brand voice document. Those are useful, but they’re downstream of the real work.
Voice comes from listening.
Specifically, from listening to how the person actually talks when they’re not trying to sound professional. The phrases they use repeatedly. The metaphors they reach for. The words they avoid. The way they describe what they do when nobody’s grading them. The rhythm of their thinking when they’re explaining something they care about to a friend, not selling it.
That’s where the real voice lives. Underneath the marketing-speak. Underneath the “I help women” formulation everyone uses. Underneath the “elevate” and “amplify” and “level up” language that turns every founder’s bio into the same paragraph.
The job of a copywriter who actually cares about voice is to listen for the real one. The one that’s been there the whole time, getting smoothed over by everyone’s instinct to sound like a business.
That’s most of what voice-led copywriting is. The writer recognizes what the founder already says when they’re not trying. The writer keeps it. The writer builds the rest of the brand around protecting that one true sentence from getting flattened into marketing-speak.
Voice isn’t about being clever. It isn’t about having a unique style. It isn’t about ten-dollar words or alliteration or witty headlines. Those are surface moves.
Voice is about truth. The specific true thing about how this person, this business, this practice thinks and talks. The rhythm that emerges when they’re being themselves. The particular shape of their attention.
Most founders have been trained out of their real voice by years of business advice that told them to sound a certain way. Authoritative. Professional. Polished. By the time they hire a copywriter, they’re so used to performing a voice that isn’t theirs that they don’t even recognize their own when they hear it.
The copywriter’s job is to recognize it for them. To play it back. To say: “That. That sentence. That’s you. We’re keeping that.”
Here’s the practical part, for anyone reading who writes their own copy.
Record yourself talking about your work. Not pitching it. Talking. Five minutes, ten, twenty. As if you’re explaining what you do to a friend over coffee. How you tell stories over a glass of wine gathered around a fire with family. Then transcribe it.
Look at what you said.
You’ll find phrases you didn’t know you used. Rhythms you didn’t know you had. Specific words that show up over and over. Metaphors you reach for naturally.
That’s your voice. The marketing-speak version of yourself is the impostor. The transcribed version, with all its messiness, specificity, and personality, is the real thing.
The work of copywriting (the real work, the slow work, the work that converts) is taking that raw voice and shaping it into something that lands on the page without losing what made it land in conversation.
It’s harder than it sounds. It’s why most copy on the internet sounds the same. It’s why only a small percentage of practitioners can do this work well, and why those who can are worth what they charge.
Voice is a strategic asset. Generic copy is forgettable. Voice-led copy is what people quote back to you a year later, when they tell you why they hired you.
I write for people who care about words because they are not decorative. They’re the strategic foundation of everything else. The right voice (the most authentic voice) makes the business hold together in a way no amount of design or marketing strategy can replicate.
This is what I do for clients. It’s also what I’m trying to do here in my own writing.
Thank you for reading.
With care,
Saralyn
